My side hobby is eating.

HERE is my treasured food post. I said before in my one month post that maybe I'd get around to making a post solely dedicated to food, and oh my goodness this is it.

Food here is not very much different than what I'm used to in the United States, but at the same time it's incredibly different. For example, I eat potatoes in the United States. But the way I eat potatoes might be different.  

For starters - if I had one dollar for every type of bread object I've eaten since I got here I'd literally make Bill Gates look completely and utterly irrelevant. To set the tone- the very first night I was in Denmark I see on the counter, a cake! The cake is put on the table after dinner, and my host family begins to describe to me what the cake is made of. You there all over in the United States are probably thinking what I was thinking "I'm guessing it's made of either vanilla or chocolate or any other cake flavor for that matter?" Incorrect. It was made of rye bread. It was literally a cake made of bread. How do you make a cake of bread? I don't know. Who invented the idea of bread cake? Det ved jeg ikke. I don't really know.  Not only do they make bread cake, I eat some kind of bread- biscuits, bread rolls, big bread rolls, wheat bread rolls every morning. I eat rye bread for lunch. And sometimes for dinner there is also bread rolls. In the cafeteria at my school, you can literally get just a bread roll for maybe 8 kroner. Like a bread roll with chocolate chips, and you just simply eat it. I'm not complaining though. My friend and I joke that by the end of the year the cafeteria will probably have received in the hundreds of U.S dollars from us just on bread, and next year they will most likely see a decrease in revenue when we're gone... it's skide godt. 

Heres the even bigger plot twist - Danes put butter on their bread. Many of you reading this might be thinking "Grace, do you live in a cave? EVERYBODY puts butter on bread??" No I mean, they put butter on every slice of bread no matter the topping, no matter the bread type. You want Nutella on your bread slice? Butter it first, Nutella on top. You want cream cheese (which I've always kind of viewed as cheese butter in the first place)? Butter first, cream cheese after. Honestly though they have the best kind of cream cheese here ever, so it's all alright. I don't personally taste a difference between butter/no butter, with/without the toppings, but maybe that's just me. I mean I'm not here to change the culture, just experience it. One more thing though- they have what is called pålægschokolade. Don't try to pronounce it, it's chock full of letters that I cannot for the life of me pronounce. Anyway - it's chocolate. And you put it on top of bread. Well actually you put it on top of the butter that is really on top of the bread, because you can never forget the butter. And you eat said chocolate for breakfast? I mean hey, chocolate on any morning is a great start to the day...but chocolate for breakfast?

One morning that we weren't eating bread for breakfast we were eating cereal. Typically, cereal here is granola, or corn flakes, or oatmeal. So that sounds normal, right? Nope, incorrect. I mean the granola and corn flakes are. But how do they eat oatmeal? Some oats with hot water and maybe milk or fruit? Nope, completely incorrect. I'll walk you through the steps of eating oatmeal in Denmark. 

1. Pour oats in bowl. 
2. Pour milk over oats. 
3. Eat it.  

I'm not joking, that is precisely how you eat oatmeal here. No hot water. Just dry oats. It doesn't taste bad... it took me a while to get used to the texture especially since I didn't typically eat much oatmeal (can I even call it that) in the U.S, but now I think I like it Danish style better. 

Now you kind of get what I eat for breakfast and lunch, lets move onto aftensmad. Or dinner. So I could write a pretty big paragraph on this, but I think it's pretty straight forward. Potatoes (kartofler) and some kind of meat (kød, or pølser if it's sausage). My host family has actually adopted a nickname for me: pølsepige, which means sausage girl in Danish. I kind of love sausage. Danes call salami kartoffelpølse which, can you guess would mean potato sausage in Danish. I eat potatoes mashed sometimes - they are usually mashed with some kind of chili or meat sauce on top (I know you're probably thinking "chili on mashed potatoes?" IT'S SO. SO. GOOD. Most of the time, they're peeled and boiled and then served with some kind of REALLLYYY good gravy on top. One night my host family made a meal that they told me was traditional. Oh my gosh I just...I can never...oh, it was so good. It was hamburger meat (which they say minced meat when they say it in English...) and it was pressed into these little oval patties. On the inside these minced meat patties were filled with cream cheese, and the outside was then wrapped in bacon. You pan fry it with sautéed onions, and serve it with boiled potatoes (on the side) with béarnaise sauce on top. No words can suffice for how good it actually tastes. 

Danes call basically everything cake. If it's a pie, it's cake. If it's a cake, it's cake. Cookies are called cake. I made this thing with my host sister which was basically dough wrapped around chocolate and marshmallows. I'm not even sure what you'd call it. They call it cake. Technically "kage" which is the Danish word. My host mom made æblekage (apple cake), and can you imagine that it was really just these little tiny cookie things with apple sauce poured over it. Oh, and they have ice-cream in cubes. Vanilla ice-cream is literally in frozen cubes. I was eating this pie thing (or excuse me, kage) with my host family once on a Saturday night, and I saw these cube things just kind of sitting on a plate. I wasn't even sure what to guess they were, like were they giant sugar cubes, or some cubed whip cream? So I asked my host mom, and she responds "ice-cream." I'm thinking w-w-oah wait a second there. Say again?  

So as you can see, food is not so different. On the other hand though, food could potentially be a polar opposite in some aspects.

My food pictures essentially had nothing to do with the food I actually talked about but they're food pictures and the food was pretty good. As you can see, I quite enjoy coffee in Europe...

Hope I made you hungry, the only bummer for you is you can't very well find Danish food ;-)

Vi ses! :-)